This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The federal government has granted Kane County ownership of five disputed roads, including the paved route that accesses Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park from U.S. Highway 89.

The county had sued to win 12 roads that it maintains were established before the 1976 legislation that caused the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to stop ceding established roads to local authorities. Two years into the litigation, it asked the court for summary judgment on the eight that it considered the most obvious cases.

Now the government has agreed on five of them, said Sean Welch, the Salt Lake City attorney representing the southern Utah county in the U.S. District Court case. That leaves the others, and even a few segments of the roads that the county has won control of, for trial this winter.

The roads granted to the county include Skutumpah Road, a 33-mile route crossing the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument between Cannonville and Kanab, and Mill Creek Road, a 6-mile route accessing private lands north of Johnson Canyon. In both of those cases, the BLM has not agreed to give up a few stretches that belonged to the state before the monument's designation — an outcome Welch said still will be debated at trial.

"We're not sure what good a road is," he said, "with a hole in the middle."

The other roads granted to the county are the following: Hancock Road (north of Coral Pink Sand Dunes), Bald Knoll Road (north of Johnson Canyon) and Sand Dune Road (the 19-mile access to the park and to the Arizona Strip beyond).

The BLM's state director, Juan Palma, said he signed off on transfer of the five roads because he knows them and knows they existed before 1976. They were the Kane County roads that generated little or no controversy, he said, and there are 2,200 like them statewide that BLM and state officials believe they can agree on and limit litigation to the rest.